As a Mac user anyway, they were very practical, and were basically the de facto standard for external/portable storage for a while. Service bureaus accepted fi

As a Mac user anyway, they were very practical, and were basically the de facto standard for external/portable storage for a while. Service bureaus accepted files on Zip disks, etc., Apple built them into a few models of Macs... they really were the "floppy replacement". The 'click of death' thing happened with their later drives; I assume they tried to cut corners either on the design or QA and things suffered as a result. The original SCSI drives didn't have that issue, that I ever saw. It was the later USB and parallel-port drives that weren't especially reliable. My feeling is that Iomega couldn't figure out if they wanted to do a razors-and-blades business model by selling the drives cheap and then charging for the media, or if they wanted to let the price of media fall, so that it became a widespread standard that they would 'own'. At first they didn't allow anyone else to make Zip disks; eventually they let Fuji and a few others manufacture them and sell them under their own brands. (I still have a few NIB Fuji Zip disks!)